Singh, S. and Mishra, G.C. (2020) Systems Biology: “Cherry Picking” in a Treasure Trove. National Academy Science Letters, 1 (3).

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Abstract

Recent advancements in high-throughput sequencing, proteomics, metabolomics, and bioinformatics have revolutionized the microbial ecology research and immensely improved our understanding of the microbiome. Metagenomics and other cultivation-independent studies have shown that a diverse population of hundreds of millions of microorganisms habitat various ecosystems of the earth. The majority of these isolates have not yet been cultivated, and their metabolic functions remain unknown. Cultivation of microorganisms holds several essential advantages, which includes the prospection of isolated culture for their potential biotechnological applications. Though it is impossible to cultivate all themicrobial communitymembers, cultivation of majority of gut bacterial community members, including several novel taxa has been achieved by using multiple culture conditions approach (Lagier et al., 2016). Such studies involve simulation of culture conditions by mimicking the natural environment and high-throughput cultivation ofmicroorganisms, leading to the development of a new approach known as “Culturomics” (Lagier et al., 2012). A rapid and reliable method for the identification of microorganisms from various ecosystems is critically required to meet the requirements of culturomics. Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS), based identification of microorganisms, appears the most suitable technique for this role. The ability to generate “portable” data to develop databases holds the key to its successful application in microbial ecology studies. In addition to high-throughput identification, MALDI-TOF MS has also been used for the analysis of microbial function or metabolism at the single organism and/or whole community level by the profiling of various biomolecules like proteins, sugar, and lipids (Clark et al., 2018;Weigt et al., 2018). The articles published under this Research Topic reported application of MALDI-TOF MS for the accurate and fast identification of microorganisms isolated from diverse environments including nosocomial settings (Florio et al.), biofilm habitats (Tuohy et al.), spacecraft and associated surfaces (Seuylemezian et al.), and cellular phones (Kurli et al.). In addition to this, a minireview highlighted the advantages and challenges associated with MALDI-TOF MS based microbial diagnosis and identification (Florio et al.), and an opinion article pointed to toward the collaborative efforts toward curated database especially for fungal community ecology (Lima et al.). In this editorial, we did a critical analysis of each article published under the Research Topic, and propose various solutions to improve the application of MALDI-TOF MS in microbial ecology studies.

Item Type:	Article
Depositing User:	Mr. Rameshwar Nema
Date Deposited:	26 Feb 2020 05:35
Last Modified:	26 Feb 2020 05:35
URI:	http://nccs.sciencecentral.in/id/eprint/797

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